Micro Dojo Loyalty and Deceit Review

I was very excited to get my hands on the expansion Micro Dojo Loyalty and Deceit after having enjoyed Micro Dojo. I was keen to see how the gameplay would change. You will need to have Micro Dojo to be able to play so, make sure you purchase that first! Don’t let the small box deceive you! Let’s see what it has to offer…

Size doesn’t matter

Micro Dojo is a small box tactical 2 player game with a matching small price tag. I’ve found the games are always tight and require an incredible amount of thinking for a game so small!

Micro Dojo Loyalty and Deceit adds an incredible amount of variability to the game as well as new elements.

There are now two loyalty tracks that run around the edges of the board – blue and red. These provide different bonuses as you progress along them depending on what tokens are drawn at the beginning of the game. Once you advance beyond the end of a loyalty track you are able to trade 2 favour for 1 victory point.

Favour is another new introduction in this expansion. Favour may be spent in place of either gold or food giving you more flexibility. They can also be spent as mentioned above to gain victory points.

Choices, choices, choices!

The set up for Micro Dojo Loyalty and Deceit has so many options now. Included are lots of new buildings, board tiles and objective tokens. There are many cards showing different board set ups and their complexity level which means you can pick the right level and always have something new to try.

There is also an alternate side to the board that let’s you play to 9 victory points instead of 7 if you are looking for an extended game. This also adds an extra objective. Also included in the rules are some more alternative movement abilities that can be used in the advanced game focusing on the new meeples. These include not moving the monk and just resolving the Monk’s space and moving the horseman 2 spaces in a straight line to an empty space, ignoring other meeples.

The amount of options in such a small game is quite astounding!

Components and playing

The components are of the same quality as Micro Dojo. We have some lovely new meeples and nice wooden score markers. The tiles and tokens are small so you may find it a little fiddly but that’s sort of the point of the game – a small box packing a big punch.

Honestly, I do find this game a little stressful to play! You can fall down the analysis paralysis route quite easily and somehow staring at such a small board magnifies this stress! It is a game that one wrong move can cost you big because it’s generally a very tight game from start to finish. If that’s the type of game you’re looking for though you will love this!